Job Summary:
9 Mothers Defense develops AI-enabled systems to counter unmanned aerial threats. The company is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design, train, and maintain models for their counter-sUAS perception stack, focusing on model research and dataset engineering.
Responsibilities:
• Design, train, and iterate on machine learning models for detection, classification, and tracking of aerial targets.
• Own the dataset pipeline end-to-end, including data collection, labeling, curation, augmentation, synthetic data generation, and closed-loop retraining based on field performance.
• Build and maintain training infrastructure, including experiment tracking, compute orchestration, and evaluation harnesses.
• Define metrics and evaluation methodologies that correlate to real-world operational performance.
• Support deployment of trained models into the production perception stack, and address discrepancies between training and deployed performance.
• Analyze field data to identify and address model failure modes.
Qualifications:
Required:
• Demonstrated experience shipping machine learning systems into production under real-world operational requirements.
• Fluency in PyTorch or JAX, including full training loop development beyond fine-tuning off-the-shelf models.
• Strong software engineering skills beyond model development, including ownership of training infrastructure.
• Proficiency in Python; working knowledge of C++ or Rust at the training-to-deployment boundary.
• U.S. citizenship and ability to pass a background check.
Preferred:
• Experience with detection or tracking of small, fast, or adversarially perturbed targets.
• Synthetic data generation and sim-to-real methodologies.
• Experience training models for edge deployment, including quantization-aware training and knowledge distillation.
• Prior experience in defense or other safety-critical machine learning applications.
• Active security clearance, or eligibility to obtain one.
• Passion for building robots or engineering projects as a hobby
Company:
9 Mothers is a defense tech company that offers an AI-powered C-sUAS point defense turret designed to engage multiple fast-moving drones. Founded in 2024, the company is headquartered in Austin, USA, with a team of 11-50 employees. The company is currently Early Stage.